Kirstein’s Lust for Art and Artists

Tucked away on the top floor of the Whitney Museum of American Art is another centenary tribute, in a season of them, to the man who brought George Balanchine to the United States. Lincoln Kirstein (1907-1996) is best remembered for founding with Balanchine the New York City Ballet and the School of American Ballet. But as a friend of his put it, he had “more arms than Shiva.”

This charming exhibition is about a few of the visual artists he championed. The son of a prominent Boston merchant prince, Kirstein became involved with art during his undergraduate days at Harvard when he edited Hound and Horn and helped run the Society for Contemporary Art. Over the years he organized shows, collected art, wrote books and criticism for The New Republic, and gave struggling artists saving doses of money. During the middle decades of the last century Kirstein particularly relished attacking the Museum of Modern Art, with which he had collaborated early on but then came to oppose. Pure abstraction was ridiculous, he thought. It had no standards. Against Mondrian and Pollock, Kirstein endorsed, among others, the artists in the show here.

They are the sculptors Elie Nadelman and Gaston Lachaise and the painters Paul Cadmus, who was Kirstein’s brother-in-law, and Pavel Tchelitchew, the flamboyant, socially connected Russian expatriate and set designer who became Kirstein’s good friend. The show also includes Walker Evans. Kirstein, long before most others, recognized photography as an art and Evans as a genius.

With the exception of Evans, Kirstein’s taste clearly hasn’t won the day, but victory is not everything in matters of artistic rank. Impassioned contrarians like Kirstein have enriched the debate over American art since the 19th century, battling complacency and more than occasionally calling the bluff of avant-gardists who don’t have very good explanations for what they’re doing.

It’s a pity that this show doesn’t venture further. At the Society for Contemporary Art Kirstein exhibited Calder and Noguchi. He pioneered writing about Sergei Eisenstein and film. At the Modern in the early 1930s he put together a show of mural paintings by Ben Shahn, Stuart Davis, Hugo Gellert and others, which provoked a ruckus with the museum board because much of the art was left-wing. It flopped with critics but deserves a fresh look, if only to recall Kirstein’s polemical zeal and fleeting Bolshevism.

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Lincoln Kirstein A show of artists Kirstein championed is at the Whitney and includes a portait of himself by Pavel Tchelitchew.

A decade later he roamed South America hunting for Latin American art for the Modern. It would be fascinating to unearth what he brought back. Lucian Freud started but never finished Kirstein’s portrait because they got into a fistfight. It should be seen alongside the portraits by Evans, Lachaise and Tchelitchew that the Whitney includes.

That wasn’t all. Kirstein wrote about an obscure 19th-century British-American painter named William Rimmer. He married a painter, Fidelma Cadmus. And he enthused over Andrew Wyeth, Jamie Wyeth, George Tooker, Jared French, Henry Koerner and many others whom he truly believed would be remembered after Matisse, Beckmann and Dalí were relegated to storage. It hasn’t happened yet.

“As for personal favorites, we all have them,” Kirstein once wrote to Lloyd Goodrich, who ran the Whitney during the 1940s. “My attitude is merely against the idea of improvisation, decoration, fragmentation and stylization.” Goodrich wrote back, “By too sweeping condemnation you can do great harm to artists and to the public’s relation to all living art.”

They were both exaggerating. Kirstein couldn’t hold back in private. It wasn’t his nature. To his brother-in-law, a gentle soul, he wrote after seeing Cadmus’s painting called “Lust,” of a monstrous woman wrapped in a giant condom: “I do not understand your aching agony about the flesh. I suppose it partly comes from hating being queer” and from the “curdled Catholicism of your nasty youth. I think it is a romantic and immature attitude.”

Kirstein, whose own sexuality was fluid, went on: “I don’t think anything as impermanent as flesh is corrupt. Lust isn’t so bad, it lasts no time at all and is not destructive.”

How refreshing. Kirstein may be excused for resorting to a language of equivocation and innuendo in public. Explaining, in a book on Cadmus, the splay-legged sailors and naked men sharing a bathroom, he wrote, “As for sexual factors, he has without ostentation or polemic long celebrated somatic health in boys and young men for its symbolic range of human possibility.”

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A portrait of Lincoln Kirstein as a college student, by Walker Evans.Credit
Metropolitan Museum of Art

Whatever. It was a different era. He liked Cadmus because representational art demanded measurable skill; it depended (here was the link to ballet) on established modes for exhibiting the human body. Out of it came the whole “symbolic range of human possibility.” So Cadmus leaned on Renaissance models. Lachaise looked at Egyptian statues when he sculptured Kirstein’s portrait as a naked man striding. (It’s in the show.) Tchelitchew’s dexterous but rather mysterious style, which is sometimes called visionary but is basically surreal, harked back to Leonardo. And Nadelman contrived urban-folk sculpture that celebrated traditional handicraft.

As for Evans, Kirstein organized the first Evans show, at the Modern in 1933, and wrote eloquently about Evans for the book “American Photographs” that included pictures Evans shot during a trip Kirstein organized to look at 19th-century architecture. It was largely thanks to Kirstein that Evans came to be regarded as the poet laureate of modern documentary photography.

Not incidentally, these were all Americans artists, even if not by birth. American art would arise from them, Kirstein thought, just as American ballet came from a Russian. From his family Kirstein inherited patriotism along with wealth, and it reinforced a lifelong sense of noblesse oblige. His duty was to promote American culture. He welcomed the ensuing struggle over ideas. Not for nothing did Tchelitchew paint him as a naked boxer, unashamed before the world, ready to take on all adversaries.

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The works by Evans at the Whitney include early classics from “American Photographs” (they’re the best things in the show) and also a few Kirstein portraits. In one he’s a sensitive, freckled undergraduate. In another, a mug shot anticipating Evans’s candid subway pictures, Kirstein pretends to be a gangster. And in a third photo, taken in 1931 during the end of an afternoon with Evans that Kirstein described in his diary as getting “crazier & crazier,” Kirstein is sawing the spout off a funnel.

With Tchelitchew and Cadmus, sex clearly stirred Kirstein’s enthusiasm. Tchelitchew’s works are minor, swimmy fantasies of bodies, the Kirstein portrait mannered and clunky. Cadmus’s pictures, microscopically precise, with muscled men in tight pants carrying huge baguettes and lolling on the grass with their legs wide open, seem illustrational and comic now.

As for Nadelman and Lachaise, they’re also modernism-lite. Lachaise’s bloated bodies and Nadelman’s slender sculptures look alternately gross and sweet. As so often with vigorous counterarguments to high modernism, the proposed alternative (Evans’s photographs aside) is disappointingly tepid, hardly a word to associate with Kirstein.

If the art isn’t all great, it’s never bad to re-examine received opinions or to be reminded of a generous advocate. Kirstein gave several works in this show to the Whitney or the Modern. And notwithstanding what he said about “Lust” to Cadmus, he acquired the whole series, “The Seven Deadly Sins,” and donated it to the Metropolitan, which, by the way, is planning its own tribute to Kirstein next month with drawings, photographs, prints, sculptures and books that he bequeathed to that museum.

Correction: May 15, 2007

An art review in Weekend on Friday about the exhibition “Lincoln Kirstein,” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, misstated the name of the ballet school Kirstein founded with George Balanchine. It is the School of American Ballet, not the American School of Ballet.